Alone on the Hill

Alone on the Hill

No one could see the Granite Mountain Hotshots at the moment they faced a wall of fire on Yarnell Hill. But the crew and the fire had not crossed paths by chance. They were driven by far greater forces: The human spirit, the fury of nature and the power of the past.

Above: From a ridge atop Yarnell Hill, the Granite Mountain Hotshots could see the wildfire begin to turn Sunday afternoon. This photo, recovered from firefighter Christopher MacKenzie's camera, was taken just after 4 p.m.

By Shaun McKinnon

The Republic | azcentral.com

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The firefighter paced on the broken pavement, where the road turned to dirt at the edge of Yarnell. A rusty haze swallowed the landscape. Trees shuddered in the wind.

He turned back toward two other firefighters, waiting by their trucks. On the radio, they could hear a crew in a plane overhead, talking about the smoke.

"It's kinda tough on us, but we'll, we'll give it a shot ..."

In a rush of static, another voice broke through, distorted.

"Breaking in on Arizona 16, Granite Mountain Hotshots, we are in front of the flaming front."

On the road, a firefighter spotted flames through a tree. "We've got fire right over here now," he said.

The fire crews had been sent there to prepare for the Yarnell Hill Fire. It had grown from a flicker on Friday night to a monster by Sunday afternoon. Now it was getting even closer, as trees near the road popped into flames.

The same distorted voice emerged from their radio again.

"Air to ground 16, Granite Mountain, Air Attack, how do you read?"

Granite Mountain. The hotshot team from Prescott. The crew had hiked up the ridge earlier in the day, before wind whipped the fire back toward Yarnell.

Outside their truck, the firefighters focused on the radio and talked, voices low.

"Is Granite Mountain still there?"

"Well, they're in a safety zone."

"The black." The black — already-burned area that should be safe.

On the radio, an operations chief tried to raise the hotshots.

"Granite Mountain, Operations on air to ground."

"Granite Mountain 7. How do you copy me?"

The radio squawked. In the background was a whining sound so familiar to wildland firefighters.

The firefighters at the truck tried to make sense of what they heard.

"Is that Eric?"

"I heard Granite Mountain 7."

"I hear saws running. That's not good."

"Not when they are in a safety ..."

The wind gusted. The orange glow through the trees pulsed. The air crewman's voice emerged from the radio again.

"We'll do the best we can. We got the type 1 helicopters ordered back in. Uh, we'll see what we can do."

Near the trucks, one of the firefighters watched the sky and listened: "Holy ..."

"Air Attack, Granite Mountain 7!"

The transmissions were confused, with the hotshots, the operations chief and the air crew trying to connect. Finally, a voice emerged, winded but clear. It was Eric Marsh, leader of the hotshots:

"Yeah, I'm here with Granite Mountain Hotshots. Our escape route has been cut off. We are preparing a deployment site and we are burning out around ourselves in the brush. I'll give you a call when we are under the she— the shelters."

Eight hours earlier, the Granite Mountain Hotshots had piled out of their crew buggies alongside a dirt road outside Yarnell and geared up to fight another fire. Together, 20 men hiked up the ridge, toward the flames.

One was 43, a fire veteran. Others were rookies earning a spot on the team.

They were jokers, gym rats, ex-Marines and ex-missionaries.

Seven were fathers. Three were fathers-to-be.

Some dreamed of permanent jobs on an engine crew. One dreamed of the ocean.

They went to sleep at night and dreamed the smell of smoke.

By the end of that Sunday, June 30, near the bottom of the hill, near the edge of town, 19 of them would confront a force too powerful to stop.

As they did, the elements of a tragedy converged:

A cluster of wooden homes amid the brambles, there for so long that no one felt at risk.

A wall of flame riding the winds of a storm, the heat of the summer and the tide of a changing climate.

A legacy of heroism amid the smoke. A century-old faith in the power of firefighting. And a daring team of young men ready for the fight.

Those elements came face to face in the course of a single weekend. But the forces that put them there were at work long before the fire began.

Friday

The crew moved along the slope into the night, a snaking line of yellow shirts and heavy boots.
Above: Sunset on June 28, when the Granite Mountain Hotshots worked on a fire outside of Prescott, in an image from Christopher MacKenzie's camera. Their assignment at Yarnell was still two days away.

Orange embers glowed as dusk eased into night, tracing broken lines on the slope like spattered paint. The 19 hotshots used the embers as a guide, cutting brush and scraping dirt as they tried to corral the fire before the sun and heat could speed its growth.

Lightning ignited the West Spruce Fire that Friday afternoon, June 28, in a storm-fueled fit through the Bradshaw Mountains and the Sierra Prieta. Of eight new fires, this one jangled nerves the most. It was burning in the Prescott National Forest below Highland Pines, a subdivision outside Prescott. It was too close for a city that had watched another fire threaten neighborhoods for the past two weeks.

The U.S. Forest Service had summoned two hotshot crews, a lot of highly trained manpower for a fire still smoldering on less than 10 acres. The crews, the feds' own Prescott Hotshots and the city's Granite Mountain Hotshots, would pull an all-nighter building firelines. If the lines held, the fire would never reach the subdivision.

The Granite Mountain crew was on its fourth fire of the month.

On the Doce Fire, which had licked at Prescott for two weeks, the guys had worked in the wilderness around the mountain that gave the crew its name. They had even saved a juniper tree famous as one of the oldest and largest specimens of its type.

With the fire under control, they had returned to the tree and formed a human pyramid to pose for a photo.

Hotshot Christopher MacKenzie's camera captured the hotshots as they built a human pyramid, shortly after the Doce Fire in June. Days later, they would be called to Yarnell.

Friday night brought another fire and more line to cut.

Cutting line was a familiar routine for a hotshot, clearing brush in a line wide enough to keep flames from crossing it.

The cutters, a "sawyer" with a chain saw and a "swamper" to clear the debris, chewed through the dry vegetation. Behind them, crewmen with hand tools hacked away at the ground, trying to scrape it down to bare, fireproof dirt.

They had hauled their equipment up the hill, along with 45-pound backpacks. They carried water, plenty of it, because they could be out for days. They had food in case they didn't make it back to camp. And at the bottom of their packs, in pouches that were easy to reach, they carried fire shelters.

The tightly folded shelter was for use only in dire circumstances, and was sometimes the subject of grim humor among firefighters. Shaped like a sleeping bag, its outer shell is thin aluminum laminated to a silica cloth. An inner shell is made of thin aluminum laminated to fiberglass. The aluminum reflects heat; the silica is fireproof. But the fabric is hardly thicker than heavy paper.

Firefighters learn to deploy the shelters in 20 seconds: Crawl inside, face to the ground cloth, hands and feet into the hold-down straps to keep the shelter in place. It's a move every firefighter learns and hopes never to use.

The crew moved along the slope into the night, a snaking line of yellow shirts and heavy boots. Nineteen men had loaded up at Station 7 back in Prescott after the call came in. The twentieth member, Brendan McDonough had been sick and would wait a day or two before returning to work.

Working through the night was nothing new for the hotshots. A regular schedule would have been novel.

Hotshot fire crews train and work as self-contained teams and conform to their own standards. They pride themselves on their physical fitness, spending long hours in the gym or hauling loaded packs up and down a hillside. They learn how to do everything on the line, whether given a shovel or a chain saw or a pumper truck.

They travel anywhere in the nation on request from incident commanders and can remain on a fire for days or weeks, sleeping on the line if needed. Their name reflects their original role, when they fought the hottest spots of a fire, but they often work away from the most active flames, building firebreaks.

The Granite Mountain Hotshots were unlike even their brothers in the hotshot fraternity. They worked for a city fire department rather than a federal or state firefighting agency or an Indian tribe, the typical sponsors for a hotshot crew.

Eric Marsh

Eric Marsh was working on a fuels-management crew for Prescott when the Fire Department decided it would build a wildland crew. Marsh, who grew up in North Carolina, had spent a summer in Arizona working fires with a friend and, after he finished college, the lure of the fireline drew him to Prescott. He was eager to get back in the wilds and signed up for the new unit.

With a crew up and running as a "Type 2" team on local fires, Marsh and Darrell Willis, a deputy chief, turned their attention to certifying the crew as "Type 1" hotshot team.

The training, testing and paperwork took nearly four years, but in 2008, the Granite Mountain Hotshots joined the elite, becoming one of about 100 hotshot crews.

That first year, the crew worked 13 assignments over 95 days. They logged more than 15,000 miles across Arizona, New Mexico, California and Oregon. The next year, they flew east, pulling jobs at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and the Pisgah National Forest in Marsh's home state of North Carolina. They also played "the big show," as they called it, the devastating Station Fire outside Los Angeles, where two California firefighters died.

That year, after a busy season, the "rookie of the year" award was bestowed on a 28-year-old Prescott native named Travis Carter. But Carter was no rookie on the firelines or even on a hotshot crew.

Travis Carter

Carter had intended to play football at the University of Arizona, where he won a spot on the team as a walk-on. That dream ended in injury, and Carter decided college wasn't what he wanted just then. So, he headed home and worked on the family ranch south of Prescott.

Carter's sister described him as a bit of a nerd as a boy, a kid who wore Coke-bottle glasses and spent hours building things with Lego bricks and Erector sets.

"By the time he was in eighth grade, him and another buddy were building remote-control airplanes out of spare Erector set parts and Styrofoam," Melissa Lange said. "They'd build the engines and put all the little components together and go out and fly it until it crashed. And then it would all bust apart. And they'd take it all down and build another one."

In 2001, Carter joined the Prescott Hotshots, a team attached to the Prescott National Forest. He found an outlet for his mechanical interests among hotshots, who relied on chain saws and other equipment that took heavy abuse.

Jesse Steed

He roomed with another Prescott Hotshot, a guy about five years his senior named Jesse Steed, a Marine who found his calling on the firelines after his last tour of duty. By 2009, they had both joined the Granite Mountain Hotshots.

Both men became fathers and adored their kids, and both were fanatics about staying fit. After his injury in Tucson, Carter doubled down on his workouts, determined not to let any weakness stop him again. Steed had broken his leg a few years before and went on a tear in the gym.

His sister, Taunya Steed, described him as a beast. He would run 20 or more miles as often as twice a week. He competed in the P.F. Chang's Rock 'n' Roll Arizona Marathon in Phoenix in 2011.

"He was unbelievable in what that man could do," Taunya said. "He was a health nut. A big-time health nut. No junk food."

Jack Kurtz/The Republic

Jesse Steed with the U.S. Forest Service's Prescott Hotshots in 2003. He later joined the Granite Mountain team, run by Prescott, and became captain.

At Station 7, the hotshots' home base in Prescott, Steed helped assemble a gym. He scouted Craigslist for equipment, and he devised grueling workouts for the crew, eager to show up other gym beasts. A hand-painted sign sitting atop one of the weight machines designated the area "Steed's Dojo."

In the Prescott forest, wildland crews would work on the other fires Friday night after the storm moved through. Two of the lightning strikes had ignited snags, or old trees. Those fires would spread no further.

Two fires had started on Mingus Mountain, northeast of Prescott. Both would be held to about an acre. The Woodchute Fire, in a wilderness area west of Jerome, would burn across 33 acres but slow when it reached firelines built during the night.

A crew of six firefighters would respond to a strike near the Cross U. Ranch, outside Williamson Valley. A Bureau of Land Management hand crew would join them and work until about 9 p.m., staying overnight to make sure the fire stayed quiet.

The storm that sparked them all moved past Prescott down into the Weaver Mountains, still lighting up the skies. One bolt hit the ground amid boulders and chaparral on a ridge not far from Arizona 89.

Witnesses reported smoke at the site at about 5:30 p.m. At 5:36 p.m., the smoke and the flames got a name: the Yarnell Hill Fire.

Eighteen hours would pass before firefighters reached it.

Belief

Above: The view from the tunnel where Pulaski's team took shelter, after the 1910 fire. R.H. McKay, from the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Region

Forty-four firefighters crouched in a narrow mine shaft, their faces covered in soot and fear.

Outside, fire ripped across the Idaho mountainside with the roar of a freight train.

The crew leader, Edward Pulaski, shouted instructions. The men draped blankets over the shaft's opening and splashed them with water. Timbers inside the mine caught fire as they worked. Pulaski used his hat as a bucket to douse flames.

Soon, the blankets caught fire. Pulaski helped replace them but smoke crept into the shaft, a thickening cloud closing in on the crew like a collapsing ceiling. Pulaski ordered the men to lie facedown on the ground, where the fresh air would be.

They were trapped, like rats in a hole.

One man rose to his feet - better to take his chances outside than to lie down here and die. He made a run for the opening.

USDA Forest Service

Edward Pulaski in 1910.

Pulaski drew his revolver.

"The first man who tries to leave this tunnel," he said, "I will shoot."

Fire consumed the air around them, and the men began to lose consciousness. Finally, Pulaski, too, felt the choking grip of the heat and smoke.

As his eyelids closed, the biggest fire ever witnessed in the modern-day West faded from his sight.

Fires had started burning in the high country of Idaho, Montana and Washington in early August of that year, 1910, fed by grass and brush desiccated after a rainless spring. The 5-year-old U.S. Forest Service, lacking money and manpower to fight a big fire, rallied civilians and, later, U.S. Army troops.

On Aug. 20, just as crew commanders thought they had gained the edge, hell burst across the landscape. Walls of flame carried by hurricane-force winds chewed through forests, obliterating towns and logging camps. The skies darkened; the air filled with chunks of burning wood, each a bomb pushing the fire farther across the mountains.

Edward Pulaski and his men had been working on the fire lines above the mining town of Wallace. When the firestorm erupted, they had no way to get below the rising flames.

Pulaski rounded up as many members of the crew as he could and headed for the mine. A falling tree killed one man on the way.

By that afternoon, the rest were lying unconscious on the rock floor of the mine shaft.

Early the next morning, the men began to awaken. All but five had survived the night.

They would find no water to ease their pain - the creek outside was filled with ash and too warm to drink. But the men stumbled back to Wallace.

Pulaski's story became legend and he a hero.

By summer's end, 1,736 fires had blackened more than 3 million acres in the region and killed at least 85 people, 78 of them firefighters.

U.S. Forest Service

The town of Wallace, Idaho, after fires of the 1910 Big Blowup.

The combined blazes earned a new name, one that would stick for a century: "the Big Blowup."

The men had gone into a forest but come home from a battle.

It would be the first against the new enemy of the land: wildfire.

Before the Big Blowup, the role of fire in the wilderness had stoked rowdy debate among modern-day pioneers.

Railroads and even timber companies, which depended on clear access to the mountains, believed in "light burning" - using fire as a tool to control the forest, a practice used by Indian tribes long before European exploration.

In federal forests, still a new concept in the early 1900s, officials wanted no part of fire. They derided light burning as "Paiute forestry" and insisted fires must be fought.

The new National Park Service saw the 1910 disaster as proof the idea of fighting wildfire was a failure.

But the Forest Service's chief had faced the great fire firsthand. So had the next three men to hold the post. For the next 30 years, the growing agency built an apparatus to put out fires at all costs, a mission that seemed to some an attempt to refight the battle they had lost.

In 1935, with the last of the Big Blowup veterans in charge, the Forest Service imposed what became known as the "10 a.m. Rule." As a matter of national policy, fire crews would attempt to extinguish any new fire by 10 the next morning.

In 1944, Forest Service officials introduced the cartoonish Smokey Bear. Their beliefs had a face and an enduring message. Everyone could prevent forest fires - and fires that started had to be put out.

The day after he graduated from Brophy College Preparatory school in Phoenix in 1967, 18-year-old Stephen Pyne reported for work as a laborer at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. That same day, a position opened up on the fire crew based on the North Rim. Pyne accepted.

He returned every season for 15 years, between studies at Stanford University, the University of Texas and a series of fellowships. On the fire crew, he saw firsthand much of what he would come to understand as a scholar, about fire and the militant approach fire agencies take toward stopping it.

"After the 1910 fires, the emotions took over," Pyne said. "It became 'How do we honor the dead?' That whole generation was never going to allow that again. They kept saying, 'We just didn't do enough.' They were going to refight 1910 and win this time."

Researcher Stephen Pyne: The two approaches to fire in the West.

Pyne began chronicling the history of firefighting in this country, amassing a library of books and documents that took over an addition to his Glendale home. He now sees fire history in short eras, starting with the post-Big Blowup years.

In the 1960s, as the old generation of forest chiefs retired or died, their replacements began rethinking the old policies. By 1968, the Forest Service moved to abolish the 10 a.m. Rule, although it lingered through most of the 1970s.

Slowly, the agency began setting fires, so-called prescribed burns, and finding opportunities to introduce fire to forests and ranges where nothing had burned in decades.

In 1988, a huge fire in Yellowstone National Park renewed debate, but reforms didn't come.

Then, in 1994, the South Canyon Fire in Colorado killed 14 wildland firefighters. Interior Secretary and former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt led an effort to examine policies, walking the lines with a hotshot crew to learn firsthand how the system worked.

Land-management agencies moved to control the landscape themselves.

They devised plans for controlled burns to clear overgrown ranges and forests where fire had been too long absent. When lightning struck, they tried waiting rather than extinguishing, "managing" the fires for ecological purposes. And they proposed huge thinning projects that would combine fire with logging and brush-clearing, returning the wild to the state it had been in before generations of firefighters arrived.

What they found, Pyne concluded, was that the federal agencies didn't own the West. Fire did.

In 2000, crews touched their torches to the brush above the North Rim, clearing out the landscape in hopes of preventing a blowup. Instead, the weather changed, and the fire exploded out of control. By the time firefighters gained the upper hand, the blaze had blackened more than 14,000 acres.

Within days, another crew lost control of a similar prescribed burn in New Mexico. That burn menaced the Los Alamos nuclear lab on its way to burning 48,000 acres.

And in 2006, after fire agencies began managing a lightning-caused fire on the North Rim, the weather changed unexpectedly. What was dubbed the Warm Fire burned nearly 60,000 acres - one of the dozen largest on record in Arizona.

Ryan Koch, Deschutes National Forest/AP

The Warm Fire in the Kaibab National Forest, 2006.

The forest-thinning was slow and costly, and it couldn't be done in lower ranges, where there were no trees, just fire-prone scrub.

By the end of the decade, the Forest Service and National Park Service could barely pay for basic fire-suppression needs. Understaffed fire crews faced ever-growing blazes, much as they had a century earlier.

Then, in 2012, the Forest Service issued a new set of instructions that turned policies back nearly that far.

In a directive to fire managers, it instructed that fires were too risky to leave to chance, and managing them until they burned out naturally required money and manpower the agency didn't have. Every fire should be fought when it started.

At the end of June 2013, as the Granite Mountain Hotshots climbed into the mountains outside Prescott, fire agencies at almost every level were still at war with wildfire - at war, in some ways, with the enemy that had struck in 1910.

Researcher Stephen Pyne: "We are not at war with fire."

Every fire had to be fought, not necessarily because it was the right thing to do, but because there was no other way.

And as they climbed the hillside, they carried wood-handled tools with a two-ended steel head. One end is sharpened as an ax blade, the other is a flattened pickax to dig into the soil.

The tool - named for its inventor, a firefighter himself - is standard-issue for all wildland crews. It is called a Pulaski.